Review Summary

Sleek as a bullet, the action star Jason Statham jaw-clenches his way through “The Mechanic,” a sputtering remake in need of a more powerful recharge. A contempo update of the 1972 Charles Bronson vehicle of the same name (alternately titled “Killer of Killers”), the story pivots on one of those professional assassins in the employ of one of those hush-hush organizations in which men murmur murderous instructions into phones so that other men can die. For a hit man like Arthur Bishop (Mr. Statham), this makes for an isolated if lucrative life that comes with a swank pad, a vintage muscle car and paid nights with the local talent. That existence takes a turn for the vaguely complicated when Bishop, after some messy business with a colleague (Donald Sutherland), forms an unlikely partnership with that associate’s wayward son, Steve McKenna (Ben Foster). With his complementary buzz cut, hard-body profile and hyperbolic masculinity, McKenna turns out to be a capable if overly reckless sidekick and a rather adorable Mini Me for Bishop in what soon starts to resemble something of a hit-man hookup. Action flicks often bristle with the love that dare not speak its name, as men express themselves through eroticized violence and the usual expressive grunting and grappling, body slamming, inevitable spasms of death and climactic explosions. When Bishop and McKenna begin firing off their guns in tandem, it certainly looks like the start of a beautiful friendship. Yet while the two come across as Mr. and Mr. Smith of the action-flick set, Bishop and McKenna can’t really go the distance, of course, in the don’t ask, don’t tell movie world. So instead, McKenna, on his first solo contract job, lures a gay man home alone with feigned sensitivity and a little dog, and then engages in a sadistic fight to the death that conveys — with the customary physical struggle and oozing bodily fluids — what cannot be expressed in any other fashion. It’s unclear if the director, Simon West (“Con Air”), and Richard Wenk, who shares the script credit with the first film’s writer, Lewis John Carlino, understand what that scene is about, but its message comes through with blunt, somewhat queasy force. There’s some limited entertainment to be found in a movie as insistently conflicted as “The Mechanic,” but the accretion of sadism, humorlessness and antediluvian sexual politics is finally more exhausting than enlivening. — Manohla Dargis